video wars
Walmart announced yesterday that it will be slashing prices to below wholesale on 10 of the most popular DVDs that will be released soon, says the LA Times. Target announced that it will be matching Walmart. Amazon has not yet responded.
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blockbuster death watch
Back in the day there used to be these things called VHS tapes. They used to cost a lot of money — so there were these places you could go to rent them. The last surviving relic of this bygone era,
Blockbuster Video (also known as the company that
was almost stupid enough to buy Circuit City), announced in a regulatory filing today that it plans to close over 800 stores by the end of next year. This is nearly twice the number they previously announced.
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redbox
John, like many people, enjoys renting movies from Redbox kiosks and does so frequently. Recently, the machine wouldn't accept his disc back. It's not a huge inconvenience, but he started to wonder why he, the customer, needs to go out of his way due to a problem on the company's end.
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movie rentals
Robert's recent experience with his local
Blockbuster just underscores how ill-equipped the rental chain is to compete against Netflix and new-star-on-the-block Redbox. Whether Robert has caught them deliberately throttling his account, or he's just the victim of a poorly implemented system, it's not the kind of customer experience you should have to settle for anymore.
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market destruction
With its ubiquitous DVD rental kiosks, Redbox has been known to toy with our emotions. The machines have taken up all the choice grocery store spots where your favorite stale gumball machines used to sit. And company execs taunted us by dreaming up that awesome Free Movie Mondays promotion only to vow to
take it away by the end of the summer.
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dvd rentals
A few readers contacted us, with tears in their eyes, to let us know that Redbox is ending their "Free Movie Mondays" promotion as we know it.
Redbox kiosks, which seemingly sprouted overnight in every grocery store in the country a few years ago, let you rent newly-released
DVDs for $1 per day. The free movie promotion sent a free rental code out every Monday in an e-mail or text message. After May 11, new codes will only be issued once per month, ending in August.
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Consumerist
lawsuits
branding fail
If we owned a Blockbuster franchise, we'd seriously think about just renting out the space to a bunch of Redbox kiosks. Blockbuster reported a 42% drop in revenue for the first quarter of 2009, which CEO Jim Keyes blamed on people going out to watch movies at theaters instead. Regarding the Redbox threat, Keyes said they hope to have 3,000 kiosks functioning by the end of the year. Redbox, on the other hand, has about 12,000. [Reuters]
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